The T-Mobile Tap is an OK phone if you really want a touch screen on the cheap, but T-Mobile offers several superior handsets for roughly the same price.

The T-Mobile Tap is one of the first truly budget-priced touch screen phones on the U.S. market. It looks like one of Samsung's phones, but it's actually manufactured by Huawei, a Chinese company. The Tap offers a well-laid out interface, Web browsing and messaging apps, GPS, and a 2-megapixel camera at a bargain price of $79.99 with a two-year contract, or $179.99 with T-Mobile's money-saving Even More Plus plan (which removes the device subsidy, but costs up to $240 less over two years). Sadly, the Tap cuts too many corners, and there are too many better options for T-Mobile subscribers.

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Design and Call Quality
The T-Mobile Tap's slim form factor is one of its best attributes. It measures 4.2 by 2.2 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.7 ounces. You can get in midnight blue or purple, and an attractive chrome band runs around the side. The soft-touch body is very comfortable to hold, and is thin enough to slide neatly into a pants pocket. The 2.8-inch, 240-by-320-pixel plastic resistive touch screen wasn't particularly bright; colors looked washed out. It required too much pressure for each key press, and missed plenty of them. Recalibrating the screen only made it worse. The built-in accelerometer lets you tilt the unit sideways for landscape view, and the small five-way control pad and dedicated Send and End keys worked well. Typing on the smallish on-screen QWERTY keyboard was cramped, and the Tap's slow processor struggled to keep up with my keystrokes.

The T-Mobile Tap is a quad-band GSM (850/1900/1800/1900 MHz) and dual-band HSDPA (1700/2100 MHz) device, so it works on T-Mobile's and foreign 3G networks. Dialing numbers felt cramped thanks to the small key sizes and plastic resistive touch screen. Voice quality was good in both directions, even in EDGE mode, with a warm tone and good volume in the earpiece. Reception and wind rejection were average. The Tap initially refused to pair with Plantronics Voyager Pro and Discovery 975 Bluetooth headsets, but rebooting the phone and the headsets solved the problem. The speakerphone sounded OK but was too quiet to use outside. Battery life was good at 9 hours and 30 minutes in EDGE mode.

User Interface, Apps, and Multimedia
The Tap's user interface recalls Samsung's TouchWiz, which is a compliment; it doesn't feel entirely low-end. A widget panel enhances the home screen with shortcuts to useful functions like calling your favorite contacts and GPS navigation. The web2go Web browser lets you view pages in full-screen mode. Desktop pages rendered well, but took several minutes to appear over EDGE. T-Mobile doesn't want to tell us who wrote their browser, but it looks like Opera Mini 5 without the launch page. Kick the browser into full screen mode and it works well even on the smallish 2.8-inch LCD. TeleNav GPS Navigator offers voice-enabled, turn-by-turn directions for $9.99 per month. The handset works with most Webmail, POP, and IMAP accounts using T-Mobile's e-mail app. The Nimbuzz IM client handles Yahoo Messenger, AIM, Windows Live, Google Talk, and even Skype IM accounts, but requires you to sign up for a free Nimbuzz account before you can get started.

Media playback was poor overall. The side-mounted microSD card slot is underneath the battery cover, but not the battery. It officially accepts up to 8GB cards, but a 16GB SanDisk card worked in my test unit. There's also 152MB of total internal storage, with 70MB free.

T-Mobile throws in a pair of wired stereo earbuds, but the non-standard mini-USB headphone jack makes upgrading tough. Finding your media is also a pain thanks to multi-tiered menus and that poor-quality touch screen. Going wireless is no option either; MP3 and AAC music tracks sounded tinny, brittle, and harsh through Motorola S9-HD Bluetooth headphones. 3GP and MP4 videos were jerky enough to be unwatchable. Worse, audio jumped unexpectedly between my Bluetooth headphones and the phone's internal speaker, and was plagued with dropouts in both locations.

Camera and Conclusions
The 2-megapixel camera is pretty basic, with no flash or auto-focus. Outdoor photos looked a little soft but otherwise fine. Indoor photos were mediocre, with plenty of noise in addition to the soft focus. A few photos turned out sickly green, but the rest had decent color balance. There was about a second of shutter delay, and I didn't lose any test shots to blurriness. Recorded 320-by-240-pixel videos were overly soft and pixelated at 12 frames per second, though they played back fine on the phone's screen.

The T-Mobile Tap isn't a bad phone, but there are much better ones in T-Mobile's lineup. At a now-reduced price of $99.99, the Samsung Highlight SGH-t749 costs just $20 more than the Tap. It's superior in nearly all respects, with a responsive 3-inch touch screen and superb battery life. Going down in price, the $29.99 Samsung Gravity 2 is a great budget choice for messaging fiends, with its slide-out QWERTY keyboard, solid construction, and better music and video playback than the Tap. Finally, the Sony Equinox TM717 is a basic flip with a numeric keypad. But it sounds good, plays videos well, and looks sharp. All three of these are better phones than the Tap.

About the Author

Jamie Lendino is the Editor-in-Chief of ExtremeTech.com, and has written for PCMag.com and the print magazine since 2005. Recently, Jamie ran the consumer electronics and mobile teams at PCMag, and before that, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Smart Device Central, PCMag's dedicated smartphone site, for its entire three-year run from 2006 to 2009. Pri... See Full Bio

T-Mobile Tap (T-Mobile)

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